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The Journey to the Perfect Search Engine

It’s interesting. There was a time — about two decades ago now — when most of us didn’t know about the Internet.

Sure, some of us had been exposed to Lycos and AltaVista, but the Internet and, specifically, search engines as they stand now? No way. If we wanted to contact someone, we looked them up in the phone book. If we wanted to research the history of the Byzantine Empire, we went to the library. There was no immediate gratification of going to Google and searching for anything and everything.

These days, search engines are so entrenched in our everyday lives that it’s not something we even really think about anymore. We simply open our browser window (or mobile device), type in what we’re looking for, and a second later we have an answer or solution.

The only time people really pay attention to this idea of a “search engine” anymore is when Google releases a new algorithm update. Those updates are typically a sign to businesses and marketers that it’s time to update their website in order to remain in Google’s good graces for ranking purposes. Consequently, by obeying the laws of search engines, businesses are also looking out for their visitors’ best interests.

At the end of the day, that’s what the search engines ultimately care about: internet users. Helping connect them to the information they need and keeping them safe while they do it.

But that’s not what the Internet or search engines initially looked like — or aimed to do —
back in the 1960s when this all started. If you’re not familiar with the history of search engines, buckle up. We’re going to take you on a long and windy road through all the search engines that paved the way to Google.

Not as SMART as Google: The Journey to the Perfect Search Engine

Nearly everyone with an internet connection has used a search engine before, but have you ever wondered how the search engine came about? Who invented it? What was the first one? Then follow along, because we have the whole story.

The Predecessor

Name:

SMART Information Retrieval System

SMART is an acronym for Salton’s Magical Automatic Retriever of Text

Released:

1960s

Use:

Interactive information database

Developed by:

Gerard Salton

Chris Buckley

Others at Cornell University

Innovations:

Vector space model:

A method of automatically weighting search results to display those most relevant to the user

Relevance feedback:

A way for users to rank the relevance of search results

Rocchio classification:

A type of classification method that increases search precision

In the Beginning

Before the advent of the World Wide Web and search engines, the internet was:

Veronica searched through 5,500 Gopher servers and indexed over 10 million items/documents

Invention of the web

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN started work on HTTP:

A system for sending and receiving hypertext documents that would link to one another in a kind of web.

It was quickly augmented to provide:

Greater client-server negotiation

Metadata

Security

Early browsers included:

ViolaWWW

Erwise

MidasWWW

Mosaic

As the number of web servers grew, the web became the interface for accessing the Internet:

New servers were announced under “What’s New” on the NCSA site

Many websites provided their own list of “interesting sites.”

This central list could not keep up with the growth, which created a need for finding and organizing all the information on the web

No Robot Necessary

Name:

ALIWEB, which stands for Archie-Like Indexing for the WEB

Released:

October 1993

Format:

Self-entry website index

Developed by:

Martijn Koster

Innovations:

HTTP equivalent of Archie

Didn’t use a web-searching robot

Webmasters of participating sites had to post their own index information for each page they want to list

Advantages:

Users could describe their own sites

A robot didn’t run around eating up Net bandwidth

Disadvantages:

Indexing files was complicated for most people

The difficulty of use meant a relatively small database

Other Info:

They tried to offset the complexity by adding other databases into ALIWEB searches, but it couldn’t compete with the newer bot-based search engines

The Indexer

Name:

WebCrawler

Released:

1994

Use:

Crawling website index

Developed by:

Brian Pinkerton

Innovations:

First crawler to index entire web pages, rather than just file or website names

Other Info:

When first released, WebCrawler had documents from over 6,000 servers

Five months after its release, it received an average of 15,000 queries per day

WebCrawler quickly grew so popular that it was almost unusable during the day

The Library Spider

Name:

Lycos

Released:

1994

Use:

Website index

Developed by:

Michael Mauldin

Innovations:

The largest library of indexed sites at the time

Other Info

Lycos is named after the wolf spider, Lycosidae Lycosa, because the spider hunts its prey rather than catching it in a web

On going public, Lycos had 54,000 documents available

It identified nearly 400,000 documents in one month

In five months, Lycos had identified 1.1 million documents

By November 1996, its catalog contained 60 million documents

The Word Smiths

Name:

Excite, originally named Architext

Released:

1995

Use:

Website word index

Developed by six Stanford students:

Joe Kraus

Ben Lutch

Ryan McIntyre

Martin Reinfried

Graham Spencer

Mark Van Haren

Innovations:

Made search more relevant by using the idea of looking at word relationships through statistical analysis, a groundbreaking approach at the time

Upon launch, Excite.com had indexed 1.5 million pages, a large number for that time

Other Info:

Excite had signed major deals with Netscape and Microsoft

Excite continued to grow with revenues in excess of $150 million as of 1998

Two fellow Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded of Google, and offered to sell their company to Excite for a million dollars in 1999

They were willing to settle for just $750,000

Excite declined what would become the largest search engine in history — a $180 billion dollar company

Yahoo wanted to buy Excite, but was turned down

Excite merged with @Home Network in 1999, and they went bankrupt in 2001

The Proto-Google

Name:

AltaVista

Released:

1995

Use:

Full-text website index

Developed by:

Louis Monier

Michael Burrows

Innovations:

Considered by History of SEO as “the first searchable full-text database on the world wide web with a simple interface”

First search engine to look for:

Images

Audio

Video

Created Babel Fish, the first multi-lingual search, which could translate:

English

French

German

Italian

Portuguese

Spanish

Russian

Other Info:

AltaVista means “view from above”

In 1996, AltaVista was the largest web index

33GB in size

30 million pages from 225,000 servers

Accessed an average of 12 million times per day

That’s roughly 140 times per second

The Web Butler

Name:

Ask Jeeves

Released:

1997

Use:

Natural language website index

Developed by:

Garrett Gruener

David Warthen

Innovations:

Developed to be a natural language search engine

Human editors assisted with some common search queries

Other Info:

The butler is a reference to Jeeves the valet from P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves-Wooster novels

In 2010, Ask Jeeves rebranded itself as a Community Question & Answer service

The Champion

Name:

Google

Released

1998

Use:

Recursive website index

Developed by:

Larry Page

Sergey Brin

Innovations:

PageRank created a citation weighting system that:

Evaluated which websites were more trustworthy based on the strength of other websites that linked to them

Today, this is the basis for almost all search engines

Other Info:

“Page” in PageRank refers to Larry Page, not web pages.

Due to its focus on backlinks, Google was originally named “BackRub”

The first website the Google crawler searched was the Stanford University homepage

Google’s index is over 100 million GB in size

People use Google to perform over one hundred billion searches every month

That’s over 40,000 searches per second

Google Now:

Uses a natural language user interface to :

Answer questions

Make recommendations

Perform actions by delegating requests to a set of web services

Is an intelligent personal assistant, accessible:

Within the Google mobile search app

On the Google Chrome web browser

Can proactively deliver information it predicts based on user’s search habits

Allows people to use Now cards to get the right information at the right time without having to search for it

It automatically organizes information into simple cards that appear just when users need them

Users get commute traffic before work, find popular places nearby, get their favorite team’s current score

The Little Engines That Could

Google doesn’t have many competitors nowadays, but here are two that are trying their best, despite the huge odds:

Duck Duck Go

Claims to remove all the spam that Google delivers in its results

Has a clean interface

Doesn’t track users

Has far fewer ads than Google

Bing

Microsoft’s search engine

Provides similar results to Google

Has a much smaller database of webpages

Yahoo! uses Bing for its search engine

While most people think “Google” when they hear “search engine,” there were several different engines before Page and Brin’s web crawler took off. While not many people use Veronica or Lycos today, the internet wouldn’t be what it is without them.

Brenda is an active online publisher and experienced WordPress blogger. She has been building websites since 1997. In addition, she publishes science fiction and fantasy stories under the name Brenda Stokes Barron.